ABSTRACT
Easmon, Raymond Sarif b. 1913, Freetown, Sierra Leone doctor, playwright, and novelist The Sierra Leone doctor, playwright, and novelist R.Sarif Easmon was born into
a distinguished family of physicians in Freetown. Easmon was an outstanding medical student at the University of Durham, England, winning major awards in biology and anatomy and qualifying as a doctor at the age of 23. After serving for two years as a medical officer in the colonial medical service, Easmon resigned in protest against the discriminatory character of the service and went into private practice. Easmon’s play, Dear Parent and Ogre (1964), won the Encounter Magazine Prize, and was initially produced by Wole Soyinka in Lagos in 1961. Easmon’s second play, The New Patriots (1965), was performed in several West African countries. Easmon’s plays are semi-comical commentaries on politics and culture in a community undergoing the birth throes of independence and corruption in the institutions of government. Although he was better known as a playwright than a novelist, Easmon also published The Burnt Out Marriage (1967), concerned with the theme of cultural conflict and the opposition between the values of precolonial society and modernity (see modernity and modernism), and his short stories have been collected in The Feud (1981).
